Call for Submissions: IHRAM Publishes

IHRAM Publishes has moved to a quarterly, themed literary edition!

AND: we are now accepting visual artwork for inclusion in the journal!

We will be focusing on the following concerns:

First Quarter: Resilience Amidst Displacement — PUBLISHED

Second Quarter: Reflections of Feminine Empowerment — PUBLISHED

Third Quarter: Childhood Reflections and Youth Empowerment. — PUBLISHED

Fourth Quarter: Indigenous Voices: Heart, Hope and Land: SUBMIT YOUR WORK TODAY!

Desirous of hearing the voices of original thinkers and land stewards, our fourth quarterof the IHRAM literary magazine is dedicated to indigenous culture and experience in light of Indigenous history in Canada, highlighting Indigenous authors and artists.

Themes: Land stewardship, spirituality, mythology and dreams, aspirations, value of the native voice, challenges faced in this modern world, indigenous experiences which shaped the writer's adulthood, indigenous culture, etc.

Of course, we will continue to look, to listen and to learn about issues of concern for creators from Algeria to Zimbabwe, and everywhere in between! Up to 50% of each issue will be reserved for pieces that expand our understanding of human rights and social justice concerns not covered by the quarterly theme.

Submission Guidelines:

Please submit your poem, short story, essay (2500 words or less), or artwork to:

submit@humanrightsartmovement.org 

along with the following information:

• Your full name and/or pen name.
• Your country of residence.
• A photograph of you (high-resolution with no filters) should you wish to provide one.*
• A brief third-person bio (2-5 sentences). If your bio includes references of your past work, feel free to provide links!
• A brief foreword to your piece, explaining your inspiration for creating it, background information, explanation of key characters, and any other key insight for the reader.

*If your piece is accepted, we will request a high-resolution author photograph. However, auhors are not required to provide photographs of themselves and are always welcome to decline, should they wish to remain anonymous.

IHRAM Publishes pays $50 per accepted written piece.

IHRAM Publishes pays $25 per accepted artist. 

SUBMISSIONS ARE LIMITED TO ONE WRITTEN PIECE PER WRITER.

SUBMISSIONS OF ARTWORK ARE UNLIMITED.

We publish an ever-expanding collection of original works from lesser known and up-and-coming writers who seek to bring attention to urgent social justice issues around the world. We base our work on the values of beauty, sincerity, vulnerability, engagement and celebration of diversity.

IHRAM Publishes has presented work from 73 countries and 30 U.S. States.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Call for Submissions: Dulcet Literary Magazine

Dulcet Literary Magazine is excited to announce its next call for submissions, November 1 – 30th. We will be curating works of fiction, poetry and visual art for our second issue, set to be released in February 2025.

2025 Issues
FEBRUARY: Dusk & Dawn (submission window open November 1 - 30, 2024)

*Our themes are meant to be a source of inspiration not a barrier for submitting quality work, so feel free to explore your own creative take on these. If a piece wanders off the path, but is in tune with what we’re looking for overall (see below), we will follow.

Guidelines:

• Submit up to 5,000 words in prose.

• Submit up to 5 poems.

• Submit up to 10 pieces of art.

• Include brief bio (1-3 sentences) written in third person.

• Attach one word document with one short story or up to five poems in one document.

• 12 pt. font and double spaced formatting is appreciated for prose.

• If submitting artwork, please include one PDF of all artwork you wish to submit or upload each piece (up to 10) individually.

• All artwork submitted must be high-res quality suitable for print (300 dpi).

• Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know promptly if work is no longer available.

• Previously published work will not be accepted.

We do not charge a reading fee

We are unable to offer monetary compensation for our contributors at this time, but each contributor’s work and bio will be promoted on our website and socials. Each contributor will also be considered for our Creatives Interview Series.

Selected works may be requested for future anthologies.

We do nominate for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Please allow up to 8 weeks for a response.

We do not accept work created by AI. Any submissions not created by a human author will be automatically rejected. 

Submit your work here.

Call for Submissions: Third Street Review

Third Street Review
Literally On the Edge

Located on the Pacific Ocean in the artists’ colony of Laguna Beach, California, Third Street Review lives on the edge, both literally and figuratively. California has always been synonymous with exploration and innovation and, in creative expression, with boundary expansion and the dynamic re-invention of artistic forms. Third Street Review is no different. Share your best writing and visual art. We welcome traditional formats as well as pieces that push boundaries, embrace experimentation, and reflect artistic excellence.

For fiction and nonfiction/creative nonfiction, we are looking for work under 1000 words. If you wish to submit micros, please do so in one document, with each piece of writing on a separate page, and make sure the total word count does not exceed 1000 words.

For poetry, you may send up to 3 poems in one document; make sure each one is on a separate page.

For art and photography, please send 1 image in one document. Please upload the highest resolution that you have available.

FOR ALL SUBMISSIONS: Please make sure that neither your name nor any other identification is on the document you submit or in the title of your submission. All work must be original and previously unpublished. This includes personal blogs or other social media platforms. Simultaneous submissions are fine – just let us know if your work gets accepted elsewhere.

If the category you are looking for is not on the list, it means we have met our submission cap.

We pay $25 (via PayPal) if your work is accepted.

Online Rights: If we publish your work, we require exclusive electronic rights to it for 3 months and non-exclusive rights indefinitely so we can include it in our online archives.

Print Rights: We require non-exclusive print rights for potential annual anthologies and promotional materials.

All other rights remain yours.

Deadline: Dec. 1, 2024

Submission Fee: $3.00 

Submit your work here.

Writing Grant: The Gulliver Travel Grant for Speculative Writing

The Gulliver Travel Grant for Speculative Writing

OPEN NOVEMBER 1, 2024 – NOVEMBER 30, 2024

Award: $1,000 USD.

Winner announced January 15, 2025.

Grant Application Process

The application form for the Gulliver Travel Grant is only active during the open submission period: 12:00AM November 1, 2024 – 11:59PM November 30, 2024 (All times UTC -4). Required materials include:

• A cover letter: Include a one-page written description of the project, including details on the travel location and an estimated completion date (no more than 500 words), and a bibliography of previously published work, if applicable. Applicants need not have prior publishing credits to apply.
• A writing sample: Up to 10 pages of poetry, 10 pages of drama, or 5,000 words of fiction or creative nonfiction. If you are sending a segment of a novel, novella, or novelette, please include a one-page synopsis as the first page of the document. The submitted work must be speculative.

Jurors will deliberate with the goal of announcing winners by January 15th, 2025

More information and application form here.

Note: The site also offers an alternative application method for those with accessibility needs.

Call for Submissions: The Ex-Puritan

The Ex-Puritan seeks submissions all year round, from anywhere in the world.

Review our submission guidelines here to send us your work!

If you’re interested in supporting the magazine, check out our Patreon and learn about the perks you can get as a supporter, including feedback on your work and free entry to the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence.

Payment:

$100 per interview
$200 per essay
$100 per review
$150 per work of fiction
$50 per poem, or $100 per poet if multiple poems are accepted
$50+ per experimental or hybrid work, at an increasing scale depending on the nature of the piece 

Check back with the magazine regularly; The Ex-Puritan is working ever assiduously to increase these figures.

Please note that we can ONLY issue payments using e-transfer, PayPal or a cheque in the mail. We also pay in CAD. If you cannot accept payment via e-transfer, PayPal or cheque from a Canadian bank, we cannot accept your submission.

The Ex-Puritan accepts submissions via Submittable: check out our general submission guidelines here!

Regular submissions to the magazine are free of charge and should fall under one of six categories: fiction, essays, poetry, interviews, reviews, and experimental/hybrid work. To submit to the experimental/hybrid section of the magazine, please email our section editors at:

hybrid.experimental@ex-puritan.ca

Unless we are soliciting your work, all submissions must be previously unpublished (this includes self-publishing, publishing on blogs, and in chapbook format).

Please note that in order to diversify the voices we publish, we have a limit on how frequently we will publish the same writer: you may publish with us once per year in up to two sections of the magazine.

All submissions received by March 25 will be considered for the spring issue, published in May. Those received by June 25 are considered for the summer issue in August. Those received by September 25 are considered for the fall issue, published in November. Those received by December 25 are considered for the winter issue, out in February. All submissions will receive a decision within four months of the submission date.

If you haven’t heard back from us in four months or for any other query not answered here, get in touch with us at:

editors@ex-puritan.ca 

Please note that we CANNOT accept email submissions. They will be discarded. We are open to simultaneous submissions for all regular submission categories, but no simultaneous submissions are permitted for the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence. If your work is accepted elsewhere, please contact us immediately at:

editors@ex-puritan.ca 

to withdraw the piece.

Writing Competition for Queer Writers: Quill Prose Awad

Queer literature is often found in the side stacks, in the back of the bookstore, under “Gay and Lesbian.” These authors are put into a genre that barely fits them, excluded from mainstream funding, and alienated by submission questionnaires and prying questions about identity and the underlying, “What are you?” The contradiction is that though labels can be alienating, they can also be empowering and community building. Red Hen Press seeks to work against the negative politics of labeling while honoring and empowering authors who identify as queer.

Award details

$1000
Book publication by Red Hen Press
Final Judge: Raymond Luczak
Deadline: November 30, 2024

Note: Entry Fee is $10. Name on cover sheet only; 25,000-word minimum (approximately 150 pages, double-spaced, Times New Roman 12pt font); prose (fiction or nonfiction) by a queer writer only.

Submissions are currently open for this award.

Guidelines

• The award is open to all writers with the following exceptions: Authors who have had a full-length work published by Red Hen Press, or a full-length work currently under consideration by Red Hen Press

• Employees, interns, or contractors of Red Hen Press

• Relatives of employees or members of the executive board of directors

• Relatives or individuals having a personal or professional relationship with any of the final judges where they have taken any part whatsoever in shaping the manuscript, or where, for whatever reason, selecting a particular manuscript might have the appearance of impropriety

Procedures and Ethical Considerations

To be certain that every manuscript finalist receives the fairest evaluation, all manuscripts shall be submitted to the judges without any identifying material.

For questions or to withdraw a submitted entry, please contact Tobi Harper. 

Red Hen Press is committed to maintaining the utmost integrity of our awards. Judges shall recuse themselves from considering any manuscript where they recognize the work. In the event of refusal, a manuscript score previously assigned by the managing editor of the press will be substituted.

Submit your entry here.

Call for Short Fiction: The Fiction Desk

How to submit short stories to The Fiction Desk

All short story submissions should be made through our online submission form. This helps us keep track of the submissions we receive as efficiently as possible. Please don't post us anything, as it won't reach the right people.

What we're looking for

We run a series of short story submission calls through the year. These always include a call for general short fiction, and usually a call for stories on a given theme as well. We also run an annual ghost story call every winter. To find out what's happening at the moment, please see the sidebar to the left. (Or below, if you're reading on a phone.)

We strongly recommend reading one of our anthologies before submitting: every short story publisher has different tastes, and if you take the time to read us, you'll find it much easier to decide what to submit. Our latest anthology, New Ghost Stories IV, is a great place to start. Find out more, or get your own copy, here. (That volume concentrates on supernatural fiction. If you prefer more of a mix, take a look at our previous anthology, Housers Borders Ghosts.)

One other thing to note is that we're looking for stories about people and places, rather than about writing itself. If the most important thing about your story is its quirky narrative structure, or if the protagonist is a writer who's writing a short story about the challenges of writing a short story about the challenges of being a writer, then it may not be for us.

Please note that we do not consider novel excerpts, non-fiction, poetry, or anything with illustrations or photographs. We also do not accept any writing generated using AI tools.
Word count

We are able to consider stories that are between 1,000 and 10,000 words in length; please do not send anything longer or shorter than this. Most of the stories we publish are between about 2,000 and 7,000 words.

How much we pay

We pay £25 per thousand words for stories we publish (eg £100 for a 4,000 word story, or £150 for a 6,000 word story). Contributors also receive two complimentary paperback copies. The stories we publish are also eligible to enter the Writer's Award, a cash prize of £100 for the best story in each volume, as judged by the contributors.

Deadlines and when to submit

Our winter call for short story submissions is now open. The deadline is Friday 31st January, 2025.

To receive updates when we launch new calls for submissions, please sign up for our email newsletter.
International submissions and translations

We're based in the UK, and accept short story submissions from authors all over the world. (All stories must be in English: if submitting a translation, please make a note in the synopsis field of who is making the submission, and who owns the rights to both the story and the translation.)
Rights

We ask for first serial rights on any story we publish. This means that the story should not have appeared anywhere else, either in print or online (which includes publication on an author's own website). When we publish a story, we ask for a brief period of exclusivity (usually six months), and the right to keep the story in print as part of the anthology. We don't ask for more rights than we need to produce our anthologies, or place any limits on what you can do with your story after the exclusivity period. Copyright always remains with the author.

File formats

If possible, please submit your short story in .docx, .doc, or .odt format. (At a pinch, we can also use .rtf files. However, please avoid Microsoft Works or Apple Pages documents as we aren't always able to open these. Read more about file formats here.)

Submission fee

We charge a £5 submission fee for each story submitted to us. This helps with our running costs (we do not receive any external funding), and allows us to devote more time and attention to the submissions we receive. It also enables us to work a little faster: we aim to respond to all submissions within four weeks. Payment can be made at the time of submission, via credit card or PayPal.
Multiple and simultaneous submissions

It's fine to send us more than one story. In fact, we prefer to see two or three. Please don't send more than three, though, and please send each story through the form separately, and not together in one document. (Please note that each story is considered as a separate submission.)

You may wish to submit to other short story publishers and magazines at the same time as submitting to us, and we are happy to accept simultaneous submissions. However, please let us know if a story you've submitted to us has been accepted elsewhere!

Our response times

We aim to reply to all submissions within four weeks, although we will sometimes go slightly over this during busy periods or holidays.

Submissions to our themed calls are handled in the same way, and will usually receive a response within four weeks: our submission calls are not contests, so stories are considered only on their suitability for publication in our anthology series, rather than in competition with each other, and we respond to every submission as soon as we've made a decision on it.

If you're waiting to hear from us, please keep an eye on your junk mail folder, as our replies occasionally end up there. If you haven't heard back from us after two months, you may have missed an email. Please check your junk mail folder again. If there's nothing there, email us:

submissions@thefictiondesk.com 

It would be very helpful if you could include your submission code, which you can find in your submission fee receipt email.

Call for Submissions about Food and Place on the Theme of "Devour": Al Dente

Al Dente seeks contributions from emerging and established writers for its inaugural, Winter 2024 issue. The theme is Devour. Submissions are open through November 22.

All work submitted to Al Dente should be accompanied by a specific, geographic location related to the piece itself (“Everglades National Park,” “northwest Tulsa, Oklahoma,” the address of a public venue). These locations — emphasizing the relationship between food and place — will be used to create a navigable map of writing and art. For a description of the kinds of work we are seeking, please see the links below. Writers may submit in more than one category.

Simultaneous submissions of are accepted. Please let us know via Submittable if your work is accepted elsewhere.

At this time, we cannot pay contributors for their work.

All submissions must be previously unpublished. We ask for first North American serial rights of all work published with Al Dente, and aim to keep contributors’ work available for the lifetime of our journal. Please credit Al Dente should work be republished elsewhere at a later date.

Poetry

As Duke Orsino extols to begin Twelfth Night: “If music be the food of love, play on.” Give us a ballad of bread, a sonnet of soups, or haiku for Honey Nut Cheerios. Capture for us the symbolism of over-indulging, the starving agony of peeling apples with a fork, and the loving lyrics sung by your high school lunch lady. Send up to four poems in separate word documents (.doc or .docx). Submit Poetry here.

Visual Art

Lovers of food and dabblers in visual arts! We invite you to submit original illustrations, graphics, and photographs that connect to food and place. Along with your submission, we ask that you identify the material used to create your work and the date of creation. Please submit your work in PNG or JPEG format, up to 10 MB. If visual art has been edited, we ask that you include the raw, unedited image in your submission. We cannot wait to see your creative submissions that highlight your (and our) passion for food! Submit Visual Art here.

(Un)common Recipes

Give us a recipe from the last Thanksgiving with your creepy uncle, that awkward first date at Applebee’s, or the time you lost the Carrolton County hot dog eating contest. Share with us the bitter fuel of your enemies, the taste of your lovers, and the situationship recipes in-between! What was your most recent meal or the food you’d kill to eat again? High tea with the royals or crumbs with society’s delinquents? The house recipe for Zen soup or your church’s sherbet punch? Whatever it is, make sure to include a recipe — nonfictional or fantastical — and short narrative (500 words or less). We want to eat your words! Submit (Un)common Recipes here.

What I Eat in a Day…

You know those questions you get from your mom she calls and asks, “Are you having enough? What are you eating?” We want to hear answers to mom’s question. What do you imagine Elle Woods, George Washington, or Neil deGrasse Tyson would eat over the course of a day? What do the daily diets of college students and professors have in common? Now is your time to dive into your influencer roots and tell us what those meals look like. Dessert for breakfast (and lunch and dinner)? Fried Friday? Game day eats? We want it all! Short (500 word) submissions welcomed, the serious and satirical. Submit “Eat-in-a-day” Logs here.

Food Narratives

We welcome additional, nonfiction prose (up to 1,500 words) exploring the relationships between food and place. Submit Food Narratives here.

Writing Competition for Poets over the Age of 50: The Stern Prize

In honor of the poet Gerald Stern, The American Poetry Review is happy to announce a new book award – The Stern Prize.

The prize of $2,000 will be awarded in 2025, with publication by The American Poetry Review in partnership with Copper Canyon Press in the same year. The author will receive a standard book contract, with royalties paid in subsequent years.

The prize is open to all poets age 50 and over, regardless of previous publication history.

A committee of editors and board members of The American Poetry Review will judge. APR complies with the CLMP Code of Ethics in the administration of this contest.

To be considered for the prize, submit a manuscript of 48 pages or more, single-spaced, paginated, with a table of contents and acknowledgments, with a $25 entry fee.

• Manuscripts must be received by January 1, 2025. The winning author and all other entrants will be notified by February 28, 2025. The winning book will be published in December 2025.

• You may simultaneously submit your manuscript elsewhere, but please notify us immediately if it is accepted for publication. Submission of more than one manuscript is permissible; each must be entered separately.

• The winning author will have time to revise the manuscript after acceptance, but please send no revisions during the reading period. 

Entry link and guidelines here.